Jessica Abel
In creator Jessica Abel, comics have found a tireless advocate in the medium’s shift to mainstream acceptability through the medium of graphic novels.
Abel’s most recent work, “La Perdida,” won her major acclaim for its realistic portrayal of a clueless American expatriate in Mexico City — prior to that, Abel garnered attention for her comic “Artbabe” and her graphic short story collections “Soundtrack”and “Mirror, Windows.” Part of Abel’s appeal is due to a misunderstanding — her style and presentation create such an intimacy and seeming transparency to the works that some readers mistake her fiction for tales culled from her own life.
Abel’s career walks a parallel with the boom in graphic novels. Slowly over that period, alternative comics began to get more attention — first in alternative weekly newspapers, then in magazines. About five years ago, publications like The New Yorker and the New York Sunday Times Magazine began employing alternative cartoonists like Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, Seth, while book publishers like Pantheon and Harcourt began publishing the sort of titles that were once the sole providence of companies like Fantagraphics — it was all changing and Abel was in that wave.
Abel and her husband, Matt Madden had a baby in December. Her upcoming books include “Life Sucks” and “Drawing Words and Writing Pictures,” both from First Second Books.
JM: When you started out, what goals did you have in the form that made you want to do mini comics and self publish?
JA: I don’t think I thought about it very concretely, I just made comics and then I don’t even know how I got the idea to make-up photo copied mini comics, I don’t know where that came from. I must have seen them around or something or known that it was something that people did, but it wasn’t like I was trying to join the movement or anything. It was just once I did it, it turned out there kind of was a movement and I was in it, then. But I didn’t know that at the time.
I started getting involved in the early ‘90s. I was making my own comics but also trading comics with people, there was a lot of mail order stuff that was going on at the time, ordering mini comics through the mail. I’d get envelopes with two bucks in them and send somebody back a comic and that went on for a number of years.
My own ambition at the time was to keep making comics. I knew that I wanted to be published by Fantagraphics — and in the end I was. After the Xeric issue, they picked me up to do a second run of “Artbabe.” That was achieving a goal but I didn’t really have any idea of what that would mean in terms of my life, where do you go from there?
JM: Was that where you saw yourself, in the Fantagraphics mold of material?
JA: At the time, it was kind of the only game out there. There were a lot of small publihsers out there, but most of them were more mainstream. Drawn and Quarterly got started in the early 90s maybe, so it wasn’t really there when I was forming these ideas. And because I was such a big fan of “Love and Rockets,” especially, I had long thought that that was the way to go.
JM: What sort of comics had you been exposed to earlier and prior to doing your own — and prior to focusing on Fantagraphics?
JA: The very earliest things were things like a collection of old 1940s “Wonder Woman” comics, and things like “Richie Rich” that came in packs at the gas station. In terms of choosing to read comics and actually pursuing them, when I was in my mid teens, 15 or something, I had a job and therefore had an income, so I started buying some comics and I was buying some superhero type comics, like “X-Men” comics and stuff like that, but also interested in whatever kinds of less well-known comics I ran across, which wasn’t that many, you had to go to a specialty store to do that, and I didn’t really do that — I went to the corner that had the comics rack.
Through various connections, I was aware of and had some First Comics, which were part of the black and white boom of the mid to late 1980s, I had some of those things and knew that there were some things less common out there.
When I got to my senior year of high school, that’s when “Watchmen” came out and “Maus” and “Dark Knight” and there was the big “comics aren’t just for kids anymore” burst of press, I was aware of those books and bought those books and was really excited about then, and when I got to college, there was a small record store in town, this little town that I was going to college in, that had alternative comics, and so that’s where I actually found “Love and Rockets” for the first time — also “Read Yourself Raw,” which is that anthology of Raw comics, “Jimbo,” and other stuff like that. When I was 17 or whatever, that’s when I started down that path and by then I had basically abandoned buying mainstream comics. That only lasted for maybe a year and a half.
JM: “Love and Rockets” comes up a lot as an influence for people of a certain age — partially because a lot of books at that were called alternative at the time didn’t do what it did, tell clear tales about real life.
JA: It wasn’t that simple, but it was straightforward storytelling, realistic kind of storytelling, and that spoke to me in terms of the kind of reading I did outside of comics as well, and that definitely was a path that I followed closely — and I think that a lot of people did. That’s what I still have been doing, straightforward fiction. People have always assumed that I’m doing autobiography because it adheres so closely to life, but I’ve never done autobiography, it’s always been fiction.
JM: It’s an odd stigma in comics that when people do work like yours — with a dose of realistic storytelling — people assume that it’s autobiography, which is not necessarily an attitude you’d find in more traditional fiction, when someone just tells a story about real life.
JA: I think in straight fiction, prose fiction, you also get that to a certain extent if there’s a recognizable character, interviewers will ask ‘Is this character based on you,’ but they don’t assume that the thing is 100 percent ripped from real life. With comics, that’s a much more common assumption and I think partly because it’s so immersive, but also because there are so many autobio comics out there, it’s such a common approach. Proportionately, many more people in the more literary minded comics are doing memoir and bio rather than doing straight fiction. It’s pretty uncommon to do straight fiction.
JM: Especially because the autobiogaphical comics tend to work as journals.
JA: Some people treat them that way. The best of the autobio and memoir is more in the memoir end, like Fun Home, which is definitely not a journal, it’s a very beautifully, intensely structured narrative — but it’s true. Or Maus for that matter. True stories, but structured very carefully. And I really admire that work. I’m not a huge fan of the kind of day-to-day journaling approach — it can be be fun sometimes, but it’s not my main interest. But when memoir is done well, it’s as good as anything else, or better.
JM: In any given thing, there are going to be points that relate to you as an author. Like in “La Perdida,” it takes place in Mexico, you had been in Mexico. What was your interest there?
JA: I just went because Matt was going and I wanted to live abroad and it was his idea to go to Mexico. I was thrilled to go, but it hadn’t occurred to me before I talked to him about it.
JM: Did you think initially it would be good fodder for a project?
JA: Not at all. I mean, you assume. I didn’t know how long I would be there, I didn’t know what it would be like. I assumed there would be something that came out of it, but it’s not why I went, I went for the life experience more than for creative fodder or something.
JM: How much of your actual experience fed into the story?
JA: Basically none, in terms of the actual story. A lot of the background material is from my experience, in the sense that the settings that they’re in are often places that I’ve been — there are a few that are invented, but they are mostly places that I’ve been. The feeling of the day to day life in Mexico City is from my experience, but the characters are all completely fictional, and the story’s completely fiction.
JM: Your career walks alongside that time frame that comics and graphic novels in particular have come into wider acceptance — it’s really totally different than it was 20 years ago.
JA: Yes, thank god.
JM: Real people read them and real people write about them and you can get them in real bookstores.
JA: And there’s just a lot more of them.
JM: Do you remember a point where you thought — in context of your work and career — that you thought ‘Wow this has changed’ or maybe ‘This book marks the difference?”
JA: Being in New York and knowing who I know, I saw this happening right before my eyes. It didn’t spring on me. Matt and I moved to New York in 2000. I think you can mark the beginning of this wave from “Jimmy Corrigan,” which was 2001, I think. But stuff had been happening all along, and I had always been one of the few optimists out there. I remember being on a panel in San Diego in ‘98 with Gary Groth and a bunch of other people and I was the only one on the panel that was like Things are getting better, they’re going up, sure the sales are really low, and blah, blah, blah, but they continue on an upward trend, bookstore sales for Fantagraphics. This was in the late ‘90s. I wrote an article for Publisher’s Weekly in 2000, 2001, aimed at bookstore owners that was a how to set up your section of graphic novels — how do you do it and why do you do it.
I’ve always played that role, very much a believer that this could happen. Now, I didn’t think it would happen so radically and so fast, so that did come as a surprise. As late as 2002, some friends of mine are working on book proposals for various projects, and I’m thinking that this is not going to fly, there’s no way, and then it did. And then things just kept going.
I do think there’s going to be a fall out, of course, because there’s a bit of a bubble going on, but we’re never going back. It’s never going to go back to where it was.
JM: It does seem that it’s crossed over into what the dream was 20 years ago — maybe like the European model?
JA: Yes and no. It’s pretty different from the European way, still. Good and bad. The American model has some advantages.
JM: What do you think the differences between the two are?
JA: French comics, for example — which is pretty much what you mean when you say European because other countries don’t have much of a comcs scene at all — are still published by comics publishers. Literary publishers still disdain comics. The sales are very high — they’re very high — but they’re also in comics format comics and there’s still a separation there. High culture does not accept comics. Which is not to say they don’t read them, because they do, but it’s a whole different sort of attitude. In the US, there’s a very American embracing of this new medium — and the fuddy duddies who were like, “Oh, comics, they’re garbage for children,” there are very few of those people — at least who will speak out loud now. In other countries that’s not the case.
JM: One of the very interesting things about you is your enthusiasm for education about comics — for instance the section on your Web site that talks about making and selling comics.
JA: That was the root of my new text book. It isn’t the only thing, but it is one of the things that fed into that, knowing how popular that section is, it remains one of the top sections in my Web site, even though I haven’t done anything to it in years, just knowing that there was such a hunger out there for information.
JM: Is the text book also about technical creation?
JA: Oh, yeah, it’s very step-by-step, a very clear pedagogical model, which has to with setting up through an essay with illustration some topic and then going into it with exercises and homework and so on to try to keep it apart and let the student work his or her way through it, conceptually — it’s not a list of tips, it’s a model based on a classroom model, although it’s designed also for individual learners to use it.
It goes back and forth between technical stuff and conceptual things, so there are chapters on storytelling and story structure, and on issues of composition, stuff like that.
JM: Sometimes you think that the comic book form — for people who want to do them — is intuitive, but do you think that’s actually the case?
JA: No, there’s nothing intuitive about it! Absolutely not!
JM: What do you find that people want to know more when they are interested?
JA: Everything. They want to know what kind of pen nib do you use and how do you set up a page and how do you put something in it and where do you come up with ideas — everything. It’s an incredibly difficult artform to master and we’ve all been asked to do it all on our own, without any apprenticeship or training or anything. It just takes years of extra effort for nothing. Why should we all have to reinvent the wheel?
Some people do take to it intuitively. Robert Crumb sprang fully formed out of somebody’s head. Not literally, obviously, but his early work is extremely strong and he just picked it up from reading comics and learning how to do it all on his own. There are people who can do that and those people have always been fairly successful, but the fact that, for somebody like me, sure my early comics are okay, but there was so much for me to learn and it took me forever. People can emulate what’s out there — they may not do a good job of it, but they can just copy it — or they can be able to, either through training themselves or having training through somebody else, think through the whole process themselves and come up with new solutions and do something really creative. It doesn’t require school, it just helps.
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